A few years ago, my husband, who at that time was my boyfriend, and I took a two week trip to Panama. It was our first long vacation away together, so as you can imagine, a lot was riding on it. We spent two days in the colonial district of Casco Veijo, eating ceviche and drinking beer in the historic town square and wandering among crumbling churches. We rented a car and drove from the Pacific coast to the Caribbean, stopping at coffee plantations and mountain villages and hot springs. We hiked into the jungle and then rafted out, our raft made of bamboo poles lashed together. I had never travelled that way before – just backpacks and a four wheel drive and the open road. It was romantic and intoxicating and I was in love.
We spent the last few days of our vacation in the equivalent of a luxury treehouse on Isla Bastimentos, a remote island attached to the Bocas del Toro archipelago in the western Caribbean. There was a bathroom, but no door, generator-powered electricity, but no air conditioning or wifi, and the best part – a balcony complete with hammocks overlooking the sea.
On our third day on the island, paging through our dog-eared Lonely Planet guide to Panama, we noticed that the very brief section under Bastimentos claimed that there were sea-side caves worth visiting. Based on what I had seen of the island so far, I imagined a tropical cave paradise: white, sandy floors with soaring ceilings of volcanic rock, vibrant coral, and pools of crystal-clear water deep enough to swim in.
After a little effort and a lot of haggling, we found someone who would take us by boat the next morning. When we appeared, bright and early, wearing sandals and swim suits, our guide started laughing. “Go change,” he said, gesturing at our attire. “Sneakers and pants.” It wasn’t going to be that kind of cave.
After motoring to the opposite side of the island, our boat entered a vast expanse of dense mangrove forests. The water was clear enough to see the murky bottom, and we lost count of the crabs scuttling along the banks, startled by our sudden appearance. We passed abandoned huts and canoes made from single hollowed-out trees, perched on the edge of the water. After crossing the marshes by boat, we completed the journey on foot, hiking beneath an impossibly green tropical canopy.
If the journey itself was more than we bargained for, the caves were in a category all their own. The entrance was narrow and steep and when our guide pulled three helmets with three headlamps out of his backpack, I could no longer pretend that the caves I had imagined were just around the corner. “Don’t be afraid of the bats,” he said to us as he handed out headlamps. “They see better in the dark than you, and they don’t bite.”
With a healthy dose of skepticism, the well-we’ve-come-all-this-way logic that travelers throughout the ages have used to justify a multitude of disasters, and secure in the knowledge that we were up-to-date on all vaccines, we started our descent.
It became apparent almost immediately what our guide meant about the bats. They clung to the cave’s ceiling by the thousands and flew silently in the darkness above us. Each time I gathered the courage to shine my light on the roof of the cave I instantly regretted it. There are some things you just can’t un-see. And the bats didn’t take long to make their presence known. The mosquitos and other winged insects trapped inside the cave were attracted to our headlamps and crowded inside the little circles of light. With such dense feeding grounds inside their own house, the bats couldn’t resist and dove past our faces, eating ravenously in the hours before dusk. “They won’t touch you,” our guide reassured us, watching me cringe. “Just keep moving.” With the breeze from the bats’ wings stirring the hair on my neck, it was hard to believe him.
As we moved through the cave, climbing over slippery rock formations and splashing through puddles, the water, which had been only inches deep at the mouth of the cave, began to rise. It was ankle-deep, and then knee-deep, and then entirely unpredictable. We’d be picking our way along carefully, only to find the floor drop away and be submerged to the waist, or to the shoulders. After a while, we were alternating wading with swimming, the cave apparently bottomless.
In the shallow pools, we could see small, transparent cave fish, their scales flashing in the light of our headlamps. The guide called back to me in the silence, “Lady, do you like spiders?” “No,” I answered him. He started laughing, “Then don’t look at the walls.”
I looked. Giant cave spiders the size of a man’s hand clung to rocky outcroppings and scuttled up and down the walls. I stopped walking. I can handle scary darkness and bats and muddy water full of clear skeleton fish, but giant spiders are my absolute limit. “They don’t bite,” our guide alleged. “They’re hunting the giant cave crickets.” Of course, just the circle of life happening in the giant insect world. Nothing to be afraid of here.
My now-husband splashed over, likely in response to the abject terror I was radiating. “You can do this. They won’t hurt you. Besides, we’re almost there.” He looked so hopeful, all shiny in the lamplight, that I couldn’t refuse. I was still trying to impress him with Being Brave. So we kept walking, emerging a few minutes or maybe hours later in a large, airy cavern. We couldn’t see the ceiling, but we could sense it lift away from us. High above us we could see a tiny circle of light and the outline of trees. “That’s the chimney, the way the bats get out at night.” It was amazing, the sense of space, of a vast emptiness around us, despite the darkness. We turned off our headlamps to magnify the blackness.
After we had rested, our guide directed us to leave our backpacks behind. The water was about to get much deeper. As I said a quick prayer to the cave gods to protect my backpack from cave spiders and goblins, I watched our guide step off a ledge into the darkness, and start swimming.
The passageway narrowed quickly as we navigated the cave. At times, the water was so high that there was barely room for our helmets to scrape by underneath the rock ceiling. We approached what appeared to be a dead end. Our guide turned to us. “Deep breaths,” he said, before diving under the water and vanishing. “We don’t know how far we have to swim,” I pointed out. The amount of oxygen in the cave suddenly seemed luxurious. “You can make it. Just hold your breath and swim as fast as you can,” my husband stated with a calmness that defied the clear risk of drowning. “I’ll stay right behind you.” I took a deep breath and dove, wondering briefly if submerging my headlamp would electrocute me before I was consumed by the watery darkness.
We hadn’t thought to ask our guide what awaited us at the end of the cave hike. We assumed we would hike to the point at which the cave became impassible, which for me had happened sometime between the words “cave spiders” and “deep breaths,” and then turn back. But in truth, nothing could have prepared us to surface at the foot of a towering underground waterfall. As the water thundered around us, my panic at the idea of a few measly spiders seemed so insignificant. What were spiders, or bats, or humans for that matter, in the face of nature’s monumental strength?
Let’s be fearless,
Jen